Monthly Archives: 一月 2015

Poetry is revered in China, but is it still a living art form? In 2006, Han Han said modern poetry–and poets–are of “zero value.” Reverence for classical poetry begins when children are taught to Continue reading →

Posted on01/30/2015byeditor|‘I Don’t Know Where Some Cadres Get Their Magical Powers’ And Other Quotations from Xi Jinping’s New Book on Corruption已关闭评论

THE EDITORS 01.28.15

Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images
Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Earlier this month, at the close of the Chinese Communist Party’s 5th Plenum, the official People’s Daily noted on its website that as this important agenda-setting meeting came to a close Continue reading →

‘I Don’t Know Where Some Cadres Get Their Magical Powers’ And Other Quotations from Xi Jinping’s New Book on Corruption已关闭评论

HONG KONG — A Chinese government official I know was put under shuanggui, the secretive system of internal Communist Party investigation in which victims are detained, questioned without counsel and sometimes tortured. Continue reading →

Posted on01/25/2015byeditor|Prison of the Mind-A Chinese poet’s memoir of incarceration已关闭评论

JULY 1, 2013

Liao Yiwu was imprisoned from 1990 to 1994, after reciting a poem, “Massacre,” in memory of dead pro-democracy protesters.
CREDIT ILLUSTRATION BY PETER AND MARIA HOEY

Spending time in jail is no fun anywhere, but each society has its own cultural refinements of misery. The sadistic imagination of Chinese prison authorities, though hardly unique, is often remarkable. But so is that of the inmates themselves, who form their own hierarchies, their own prisons within prisons.

At the Chongqing Municipal Public Security Bureau Investigation Center, for example, also known as the Song Mountain Investigation Center, the cell bosses devised an exotic menu of torments. A few samples:

SICHUAN-STYLE SMOKED DUCK: The enforcer burns the inmate’s pubic hair, pulls back his foreskin and blackens the head of the penis with fire.

Or:

NOODLES IN A CLEAR BROTH: Strings of toilet papers are soaked in a bowl of urine, and the inmate is forced to eat the toilet paper and drink the urine.

Or:

TURTLE SHELL AND PORK SKIN SOUP: The enforcer smacks the inmate’s knee caps until they are bruised and swollen like turtle shells. Walking is impossible.

There are other tortures, too, meted out in a more improvised manner. Liao Yiwu, in his extraordinary prison memoir, “For a Song and a Hundred Songs” (translated from the Chinese by Wenguang Huang; New Harvest), describes the case of a schizophrenic woodcutter who had axed his own wife, because she was so emaciated that he took her for a bundle of wood. The cell boss spikes the woodcutter’s broth with a laxative, and then refuses to let him use the communal toilet bucket, with the result that the desperate man shits all over a fellow-inmate. As a punishment for this disgusting transgression, his face is smashed into a basin. The guards, assuming that he has tried to commit suicide, a prison offense, then work him over with a stun baton.

Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 to study the country’s prison system, and ended up writing “Democracy in America.” Observing the Chinese prison system from the inside, from 1990 to 1994, as a “counterrevolutionary” inmate, Liao Yiwu tells us a great deal about Chinese society, both traditional and Communist, including the impact of revolutionary rhetoric, forced denunciations and public confessions, and, as times have changed since Mao’s misrule, criminal forms of capitalism. He ends his account by saying that “China remains a prison of the mind: prosperity without liberty.”

Liao was incarcerated for writing a poem, “Massacre”—a long stream-of-consciousness memorial to the thousands of people who were killed on June 4, 1989, when the pro-democracy movement was crushed throughout China. The poem, in its English translation by Michael Day, begins as follows:

Policemen stand in formation as they guard on the bund where people were killed in a stampede incident during a new year’s celebration, in Shanghai, on Jan. 3. Chinese state media and the public criticised the government and police on Friday for failing to prevent the stampede in Shanghai that killed

About ICPC

The Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC) is a non-political, non-profit organization of writers that fights for the protection of freedom of expression and publication, and works toward ensuring the free flow of information, a prerequisite for a truly open society.More